I’m watching you Raymond Kessel
by kinghit
Summary: A short discourse, based on 'Fight Club' by Chuck Palahniuk, on the after-effects of meeting Tyler Durden at gunpoint for Raymond K Hessel.


'The Life of Raymond K Hessel'  
  
'Get out of here and do your little life, but remember I'm watching you Raymond Kessel, and I'd rather kill you than see you working a shit job for just enough money to buy cheese and watch television.'  
  
The impersonal solid metal barrel of the gun, dripping with Raymond's twelve dollars an hour sweat and tears, pressed against his cheek so hard it made him turn his head to the ground, where he crouched huddled and shivering. A second later it was gone. He looked up and the man was gone. He was alone except for the dull buzzing of the solitary street light above him.  
  
He rose slowly to his feet before a fit of nervous coughing racked his chest and doubled him over. He lurched like this to the back door of the shop and locked it. He went to the till, tallied up the final sales of the day and emptied the cash into the tiny steel safe under the counter. He switched off the hot dog stand, its three day old sausages turning on the rotisserie, dripping their fat deposits into the collecting pool of oil in the tray below, each drip creating an ever widening ripple of disgust. He loaded the stale donuts, suffocating with moisture in their sealed bags stained the colours of yellow, green and pink, into the nearest drinks fridge. He slid the glass door to the pie rack closed and switched it off at the wall.  
  
He grabbed his jacket and keys and switched off the overhead neons which filled the room in a stark evangelical light that always struck him as inherently false: a trick of lights underplaying the lies he was selling, underplaying the lack of meaning in his pursuit as a shop-clerk, underplaying the lack of existence his life had had up to this point. He pulled the wire-mesh security grill down, clackety, clackety, clack, locked it in place and went home.  
  
Raymond Hessel never returned to his job at the 7-11 ever again. Raymond never frequented any of the international consortium of 7-11 chain stores ever again, not even when he was stranded in Portland, Oregon, years later, and he had to trudge five city blocks to get to a money machine in a seamy part of town in order to get a cab, in order to just get the hell out of there - not even then.  
  
Raymond didn't sleep that entire night. His girlfriend bade him come to bed, she was sleepy, it was late, Raymond it's cold, she said, but he still wouldn't come. Instead he sat on the cold hard-wood floor in the living room, clothed only in his under shorts, his eyes staring blankly at the bare bricks of the flat walls, the bare bricks of his life, to make of them what he would, now that he had no choice, now that he would die if he didn't. Raymond didn't consider for a second who the man was who had put a gun to his head as he had left the back of the store to take out the trash. He didn't consider calling the police and reporting the incident. He didn't ponder why the man hadn't taken his wallet or robbed the till. He just knew that this had happened and that was how it was meant to be. This was his life now.  
  
The man had found Raymond's expired student ID card in his wallet. He had demanded to know what it was Raymond had studied, what Raymond had dreamed of becoming. Anything but this. The man had issued a promise – that if Raymond didn't enroll again and take the degree and finish it and complete what his life was supposed to be, he would wake up dead, shot in the back of the head.  
  
'I know who you are. I know where you live. I'm keeping your licence, and I'm going to check on you, mister Raymond K Hessel. In three months, and then in six months, and then in a year, and if you aren't back in school on your way to being a veterinarian, you will be dead.' The man had said.  
  
That next morning, Raymond made an emergency application for the veterinary school's summer intake, at the very college and for the very course he had dropped out of all those years ago.


End file.
